Culture and Rights Anthropological Perspectives

Culture and Rights Anthropological Perspectives Edited by Jane K.Cowan, Marie-BeÂneÂdicte Dembour and Richard A.Wilson published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011±4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de AlarcoÂn 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org # Cambridge University Press 2001 This book is in copyright.Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2001 Reprinted 2002 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeset in Plantin 10/12pt System 3b2 [ce] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data Culture and rights: anthropological perspectives / edited by Jane K.Cowan, Marie-BeÂneÂdicte Dembour, and Richard A.Wilson. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 79339 4 ± ISBN 0 521 79735 7 !pb) 1.Human rights ± Cross-cultural studies. 2.Cultural relativism. I.Cowan, Jane K.,1954± . II.Dembour, Marie-Be ÂneÂdicte, 1961± . III.Wilson, Richard A.,1964± . JC571.C75 2001 306±dc21 00±045523 ISBN 0 521 79339 4 hardback ISBN 0 521 79735 7 paperback Contents List of contributors page ix Preface xiii 1 Introduction 1 Part I: Setting universal rights 27 2 Changing rights, changing culture 31 sally engle merry 3 Following the movement of a pendulum: between universalism and relativism 56 marie-benedicte dembour 4 Imposing rights? A case study of child prostitution in Thailand 80 heather montgomery 5 Gendering culture: towards a plural perspective on Kwena women's rights 102 anne griffiths 6 Between universalism and relativism: a critique of the UNESCO concept of culture 127 thomas hylland eriksen Part II: Claiming cultural rights 149 7 Ambiguities of an emancipatory discourse: the making of a Macedonian minority in Greece 152 jane k. cowan 8 From group rights to individual rights and back: Nepalese struggles over culture and equality 177 david n. gellner vii viii Contents 9 Advancing indigenous claims through the law: re¯ections on the Guatemalan peace process 201 rachel sieder and jessica witchell 10 Rights as the reward for simulated cultural sameness: the Innu in the Canadian colonial context 226 colin samson Index 249 1 Introduction Jane K. Cowan, Marie-BeÂneÂdicte Dembour and Richard A. Wilson Rights and culture as emergent global discourses In the past few decades there has been a dramatic increase in negotia- tions between social groups of various kinds and political institutions, whether at the local, national or supra-national level, phrased in a language of `rights'. Processes of globalization have led to rights discourses being adopted widely throughout the world, far from their original sites in the French and American revolutions. Just as impor- tantly, they have framed new domains of political struggle, such as reproductive rights, animal rights and ecological rights. Constituting one historically speci®c way of conceptualizing the relations of entitle- ment and obligation, the model of rights is today hegemonic, and imbued with an emancipatory aura. Yet this model has had complex and contradictory implications for individuals and groups whose claims must be articulated within its terms. The ubiquity and the diversity of both rights discourses and rights practices on the one hand, and their enormous implications for justice and peace on the other, make it more compelling than ever to widen the debate and make it more interdisciplinary. This volume adds an anthropological perspective to the debate: we argue for the need of a forum in which theoretical explorations of rights, citizenship and related concepts can engage with empirical, contextual studies of rights processes. This is important because local concerns continue to shape how universal categories of rights are implemented, resisted and transformed. However, despite the global spread of rights-based political values, the speci®cities of any particular struggle cannot be grasped empirically through a methodological focus on the local community alone. For in the process of seeking access to social goods ,ranging from land, work and education to freedom of belief and recognition of a distinctive group identity) through a language of rights, claimants are increasingly becom- ing involved in legal and political processes that transcend nation-state boundaries. Our desire to explore the tensions between local and global 1 2 Introduction formulations of rights leads us to consider in more detail the interplay between the languages and institutions at a multiple of levels, from the local through to the transnational. A striking feature within the contemporary ef¯orescence of rights discourse is the increasing deployment of a rhetoric of `culture'. We are particularly concerned with the implications of introducing `culture' into rights talk. Although `rights' and `culture' have emerged as key- words of the late twentieth century, their relationship to each other, both historically and in the present, has been conceived in quite variable ways. Nancy Fraser ,1997: 2) has identi®ed the `shift in the grammar of political claims-making' from claims of social equality to claims of group difference to be a de®ning feature of `a post-socialist condition'. Yet this condition clearly draws on forms of activism and critique developed within civil society in the past four decades, particularly in North America and Europe. These are worth summarizing brie¯y. The 1960s were characterized by struggles in both North America and Europe to achieve political and economic equality for groups facing disadvantage on the basis of race and class and, with respect to Southeast Asia, Latin America and elsewhere, by struggles against neo- colonial exploitation. The failure of these movements to achieve fundamental reforms led, for some, to disillusionment with the legislative and judicial practices of liberal democracies and their models of neutral justice and formal equality. In the absence of economic enfranchisement and greater involvement in political decision-making, attempts to change societal discrimination became focused on `culture' at the level of discourse and representation. Some activists sought to transform the fundamental values of their society, for instance by creating a global environmental movement, while others worked to renegotiate an ex- isting group's position and status within the larger polity, as happened with the Black Power movement in the US. The latter process involved revalorizing ethnic or racial markers of a despised distinctiveness, and in some cases, creating new markers where had none previously existed. The emphasis on `culture' ± ideas, beliefs, meanings, values ± emerged in the context of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s as part of a radical questioning of what was derisively dubbed `the System'. To take the US, where such developments were most promi- nent, the ensuing ethnic and Native American movements followed the lead of Black activists in criticizing the melting-pot ideal and celebrating their differences from the Anglo-Saxon majority. In the identity politics which have ensued, culture holds a central place. Discourses of identity have appropriated the old anthropological sense of this term as the shared customs and worldview of a particular group or kind of people. Introduction 3 The popular conception that a group is de®ned by a distinctive culture and that cultures are discrete, clearly bounded and internally homogenous, with relatively ®xed meanings and values ± what we call an essentialist view of `culture' ± echoes what was until recently a dominant, if contested ,see Brightman 1995), understanding of `culture' within the discipline of anthropology. Signi®cantly, this view re¯ects both Romantic nationalism, which conceives of diversity as a problem to be solved, and what Terence Turner ,1993) has labelled `difference multiculturalism', which conceives of diversity as a richness to be celebrated ,although only as a mosaic of separate and distinct cultural units).1 Intriguingly, in the 1980s, at the very moment in which anthropologists were engaged in an intense and wide-ranging critique especially of the more essentialist interpretations of the concept, to the point of querying its usefulness at all,2 they found themselves witnessing, often during ®eldwork, the increasing prevalence of `culture' as a rhetorical object ± often in a highly essentialized form ± in contemporary political talk.3 Inspired in part by the surprise of this collision of two quite different manifestations of the concept in anthropological research, this volume examines `culture' as an object of rights discourses, as well as examining the local and global conditions which compel and constrain such claims and the contexts in which they are articulated. But it seeks, also, to explore the extent to which the concept of `culture' ± revised, to be sure, in the light of the thoroughgoing critique ± could be useful as an analytical tool to make sense of claims-making in the global context. Might it not help us, for example, to identify and think more produc- tively about the

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